Kelly Cooper

Extraordinary baker and cookbook author Kelly Cooper grew up in California's orchard-rich Santa Clara Valley, where she and her mother scooped up fresh fruit and nuts before beginning baking sprees. Baking with berries right off the vine and pears straight from the orchard, young Kelly became a baking pioneer, inventing her own cookies and entering baking and canning into the county fair.

She continued baking and inventing into adulthood (today, she teaches web development and marketing) by creating savory cookies, incorporating tastes of artisanal cheeses, peppers, herbs and even pasta, salami and fresh vegetables.

Today, Santa Clara Valley is known as Silicon Valley: its products desirable but not edible---except for Kelly Cooper's cookies which have delightfully surprised top pastry chefs and foodies on both coasts. "Kelly Cooper isn't the first baker to come up with savory cookies," East-Coast food writer Sylvia Carter declares, "but she does it best."

Meanwhile, Gael Greene, dean of New York critics, loves Kelly Cooper's sophisticated dessert cookies, such as a chocolate with habanero, and another that contains pear and blue cheese.

San Francisco food adventurer Chris Milano says Kelly's book COOKIES for GROWN-UPS, which pairs each cookie, sweet or savory, breakfast or late-night, with an adult drink---cocktail, wine, ale or coffee---is today's must-have entertainment manual. He bakes up batches of the cookies that go with beer.

World-famous pastry chef Nancy Olson has paid COOKIES for GROWN-UPS the ultimate compliment, calling it a "baking adventure," an easy-to-follow "map to little treasures."